Better living through empiricism

Development

June 21, 2014

The Japanese bullet trains, literally translated as new highways, began operations in 1964, coinciding with the Tokyo Olympics. Some of that difference with the history of the United States is of course driven by geography and the fact that it’s much easier to build straight rail in country forced to redevelop itself after bombing. Nonetheless, given the decay inflicted upon our cities by the interstates, I feel confident in saying that President Eisenhower should have gone with trains, at least on the North-East corridor and the like.

Our journey south had two legs; the longer stretch was between Tokyo and Osaka. The picture on the left is of the more rural end of the spectrum of what we were seeing. Cities and towns were also regularly present at the foot of misty mountains. Prior to going to Japan we had picked up a deck-building board game called Trains with a Japanese theme. One of the features of the board was that plains were in light green and mountains were in dark green. After this section I understood why; vast hills were everywhere and from what we could see beneath the mists they seemed consistently below the tree line.

The stop in Shin-Osaka was fun for me, although we didn’t have time to leave the station. Shin-Osaka refers to the new Osaka station; the older central one couldn’t affordably be expanded to become a network hub and as a result you’ve got to catch a quick train to get between the two. General fans of technological wackiness should note that there’s an escalator that briefly turns flat in the middle. This was actually our second strange pedestrian aid of the trip. When we were transiting through Toronto they had a high speed moving walkway with foot-wide platforms moving at higher than usual speed, spreading out for most of the journey and scrunching together at the ends. I suppose the lesson there is just that inventors and designers think a lot about how to efficiently move people through hub stations.

June 09, 2014

The ride into Tokyo takes an hour on the N'ex (Narita Airport Express). That fact, combined with the sexy streamlined N'ex engine you see on the right, confused me as I knew high speed rail should be able to travel the distance between even a far flung airport and its base city in a fraction of the time. The answer was quite straightforward, mere streamlining does not high speed rail make. The actual Shinkansen require far straighter track and have streamlined nose cones that are reminiscent of airplanes.

The countryside witnessed on the journey into Tokyo is not rural but does include rice paddies. As in China and Egypt there is no arable land to spare, in large part because of the widespread hills and mountains. As I understand it, the difference is that Japanese production is artisanal rather than subsistence. Japan is a net importer of rice but has particular standards when it comes to that staple and other crops.

When we arrived at Tokyo station, Moti took a moment to exploit the JR station provided free wifi and get a map for our hotel. That said, don’t necessarily rely on that trick, in part due to use of a range of bands, some of our phones often did not see or could not use any given wifi service. We did already have an address, but under the Japanese system, addresses refer to neighborhood and block numbers rather than position on the street. The numbers are sequential within the neighborhood, but there are no numerical avenues or grid-style positioning reference points. Thus, if you don’t have mobile internet access, it is best to have the closest transit stop with a map image handy for any locations not listed in a guidebook.

Fortunately, our hotel, the Mitsui Garden Hotel Shiodome Italia-ga, was labeled on the station map. The Italia-ga part of the name refers an Italian theme in the district as a whole, also reflected in the Italian restaurant in the hotel. That said, we favored cheaper fare for the night and went to one of the local convenience stores, a FamilyMart. The name convenience store does accurately describe the longer hours and range of products, but notably these stores offer a range of fresh pastries and food choices more in keeping with the prepared food section of a high-end grocery store than any counterpart in the U.S. What’s remarkable is that the prices are in line with conveniences stores in the U.S., the breakfast and snack items on the right were under ten dollars and will easily feed two. FamilyMart was Moti’s favorite variant, and indeed this one had a nice seating section and had a melon pastry (in the center top of the photo) that was a favorite of Kate throughout the trip.

We made an early night of it, to better handle the jet lag. The next morning, we would rise early to head over to Tsukiji, Tokyo’s famous fish market and the associated vegetable market. After that it was on to Hiroshima for the first leg of our trip.

August 23, 2013

There’s a trope in speculative fiction where a comparatively normal person from our world can travel to another place or time where they typically become a hero using the skills, knowledge, and values they picked up at home. It’s a storyline that dates at least back to Mark Twain and a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. There’s a sub-genre where our hero, rather than being stuck in this other world, actually travels back and forth a few times and may pick up supplies from home. Think Inu Yasha, Adam Strange, or to a lesser extent Escaflowne.

Take that setup, and imagine it were written by John le Carré. In the Bloodline Feud, the alternate dimension has largely medieval technology but is a realistic alternate timeline for Earth with no magic beyond the dimension-hopping conceit. Intervening in this world is prone to draw pushback and other people with this power have had generations to think through how to use it. The result can read like a cross between a primer on developmental economics, a venture capital history, and a crime family drama.

I’m a fan of Charles Stross and in this series, he gives me what I want, good and hard. The world is well thought out, the rules consistent and easy to understand, and the characters act in ways that incorporate the second-order implications of the premises.

Sadly, while I enjoyed the book and read it with increased fervency, I can’t broadly recommend it. The story fascinated me whenever the characters went exploring different worlds, but the parts on intra-family intrigue did not draw me in to the same degree. Similarly, there were a few reveals that were plausible and worked to further the political thriller plotlines, but reduced my interest in a few characters. While the protagonist is not an anti-hero, I wonder if my problem here might be the same reason I’m not as interested in, say, the Sopranos or Breaking Bad: the travails of criminal families only hold so much interest to me. Ironically, the inclusion of this tradecraft is part and parcel of the realism I like.

This won’t be enough to dissuade me, but I’m going to limit my recommendation to those that are actively intrigued by the idea of a thought through tale of an independently acting modern developed world citizen put in a less developed environment with the resources to make a difference. If that does appeal, I’d recommend picking up the omnibus editions if you can get them, as while this was first put out as two separate books, they work better together. I intend to keep up with the series.

February 13, 2011

What anti-urban Jeffersonians fail to understand is that these all-important knowledge-intensive services thrive on the face-to-face contact that defines urban life… So when we prevent our cities from getting bigger and denser, when we see them as “pestilential,” we short-circuit the innovations that make us rich.

And it’s not just high-flying entrepreneurs and knowledge workers who benefit from density. The most productive workers place a very high value on their time, and they need to purchase time-saving services like restaurant meals from other workers in proximity. This creates opportunity for immigrants, young people, and the poor.

The whole piece in the Daily is just two pages and well worth the quick read. I think he’s also right that those taking up the anti-urban cause are sometimes go for spurious arguments about liberty or a twisted nimby version of environmentalism. While I’d hesitate to limit Salam to any single standard ideological grouping, I think it’s safe to say that he’s not calling for any sort of central planning as an alternative. Instead, he has a cause that could potentially appeal those with a wide range of views: lift the counter productive regulations that only allow for some of our most innovative cities or livable communities because they were grandfathered in.

February 03, 2011

Our tour group was comprised of eight people and our guide, a reasonable size for walking through fairly narrow areas. Our first stop was in one of the pest control labs in the back, where they study ways of fighting fungal blights and flora-destroying bugs with predatory insects that feed on or otherwise disable the destructive ones without harming the plants. Our tour guide handed out several vials of ladybugs to be released later. Greg took his ladybug-carrying duty with great seriousness. I remembered my mom trying a similar thing with her rose plants, gently transferring any ladybugs she found to them so they could eat the aphids there.

We headed outside and passed by one of the labs where they're growing plant samples and actively doing join research with the U.S. Department of Agriculture on various plant blights.

After that, we walked into one of the hydroponic greenhouses. This is where the walking tour starts revisiting parts of the boat tour, but from the other side. Here, pots of colorful edible flowers, herbs, and giant brussels sprouts dangle from overhead conveyer belts. Our guide admitted that this part of the setup was done primarily to look cool, but it is a tourist attraction in addition to a working greenhouse, so it's quite understandable. Here we also learned about making our own miniature hydroponic gardens at home, using an aquarium as the base. We're considering making an herb garden, since we would like to have fresh herbs available and neither the strong sun exposure of our front yard nor the shadowed parts of our backyard are conducive to growing them.

In the next greenhouse, we revisited the vegetables: cucumber vines, tomato trees, romaine spirals, and a patch of lettuce that spelled out the word "Epcot." Here the ladybugs were gently released to perform their pest-control duties. We also got to see the Mickey ear-shaped molds used for the cucumbers and got to have a sample of a non-Mickey one. It tasted pretty much like a normal cucumber, though I thought it was a bit more green than most. The greenhouse after that contained the massive citrus and squash, including a nine-pound lemon with a two-inch thick rind that could produce up to a gallon of juice, and giant pumpkins that could be the start of a Cinderella coach growing program.

Next, we headed back to the fish tanks. We discovered that tilapia is one of the most efficient fish to commercially farm, as they have a very high growth rate. We each got a handful of pellets and got to feed them They're very lively at feeding time, so there was a lot of splashing around. We also got a look at the huge bass, the large catfish, and the (no oxymoron) giant shrimp. I guess they're more like prawns. There was also a tank full of small alligators, which surprised me. I'm not really used to thinking of gators as something to be farmed, but they apparently have their commercial uses as well.

Finally, we made it to the last greenhouse, which was the first one we entered on the boat tour. Here we got a close-up look at a banana tree, which I had never seen the flowers of before. I had also never seen a pineapple plant, either. There were also a whole variety of teas: the standard tea plant, but also mint and jasmine and several others. There was also an herb garden, and we played a game where we passed around vials of different types and had to guess what they were. The ginger I got right away, but embarrassingly enough I missed the vanilla.

After that, we retraced our path through all the greenhouses, thanked our tour guide, and rejoined the hustle and bustle of the park. It was just about time to head off for Soarin', which we'll cover in the next entry.

~Kate

Photographs by Greg Sanders and family, available under a creative commons license.

February 01, 2011

No sudden but inevitable betrayals here, just lots of neat things to see at The Land pavilion in Epcot. Hello, this is intrepid guest blogger Kate!

When we first got in to the park, I had my requisite oohing and ahhing moment at the giant silver faceted sphere (actually called Spaceship Earth, after the ride it contains, but we'll get to that later) before we headed off to The Land pavilion. Our guidebook highly recommended Soarin', a recently installed ride in said pavilion, so we decided to go straight there and get Fast Passes for it so we could be assured a space.

I'll take a moment here to explain about Fast Passes, which we used quite extensively at the Magic Kingdom the next day. Basically, you take your ticket to the entrance of the ride/attraction and insert it into one of the Fast Pass machines. It prints out a pass for each ticket. The Fast Pass has an hour window in which you can return and get into an express line. So, for example, earlier in the day you might be able to get a Fast Pass for 11:00 to 12:00, but by midday you might be looking at 5:17 to 6:17. For the really popular rides, Fast Passes run out by midafternoon. Captain EO was Fast Passed out by the time we got into the park, which couldn't have been more than half an hour after opening.

We got our Fast Passes pretty early, but we still had two hours before our window opened. We decided to go on the Living with the Land ride, right next to the entrance for Soarin'. This is a boat ride through several animatronic landscapes, such as a jungle, a desert, and a prairie, followed by some environmental discussion on the effects of humans on the land (i.e. over-farming and deforestation versus conservation efforts) and finally a brief tour through the actual working fish farm tanks and greenhouse right on the premises. This is possibly the only remaining part of Epcot that's stayed true to Walt Disney's original vision of a place to actually live and work.

For an extra $18/person, you can take a walking tour of the greenhouse, which lasts about an hour. We were intrigued by what we saw on the boat ride and wanted a closer look. I admit to a love of greenhouses in winter and an interest in cool biology stuff passed down to me from my mom, a former high school biology teacher. So we decided to spend the extra money and take the tour. They gave us nametags to fill out and told us where to meet up for the tour star.

We had about half an hour to burn before the tour started, so we went to see The Circle of Life, a film starring Timon and Pumbaa (with a guest appearance by Simba) that's billed as an ecological fable. It was a little preachy, but not overly annoying, and I'm a fan of the original Lion King movie, so it was fairly cute. I admit to being a bit worried that we'd be late for our tour, but the timing worked out perfectly, continuing our streak.

Photographs taken by Kate and family available under a creative commons license. Slideshow to be included in the second half of the post.

April 08, 2009

Some of the pushback against Gates' Defense proposal is that he's shifting too far from conventional warfare to counter-insurgency. This is sometimes described as fighting the last war despite the fact that the wars are still ongoing and the programs being cut were made for the Cold War and thus even further out of date. Regardless of what we need for counter-insurgency, we're overly invested in conventional warfare capability. There is a risk in trying to make a force that can do both, better to split capabilities and allow specialization.

It is simply incorrect to say that only the Army can perform post-conflict reconstruction and I'm utterly unconvinced that its proper for the US military to be expanding its skill set to include aid and development functions. Isn't this why we have a civilian agency dedicated to aid and development?

Now as some of my friends at the Pentagon often remind me AID and State, as currently formulated, are not as well positioned as they should be to play these roles. But the solution is not to outsource this stuff to the military, it's to build up capacity at civilian agencies so they are better able to play their assigned roles! One of the reasons the military has taken on responsibilities that used to be restricted to civilian agencies is that they were given the responsibility at the outset of the Iraq War - and under the Bush Administration the capacity of our civilian agencies was allowed to diminish.

In the end, this is perhaps the greatest problem I have with counter-insurgency doctrine, and the most intractable divide between myself and COIN-danistas: embedding COIN in military doctrine is not a benign exercise. It risks shifting power dramatically and perhaps irreversibly toward the military and away from civilian agencies - and it provides a rationale for ever-expanding military budgets. Considering that the greatest security challenges facing the US in the future will come from non-state actors and transnational threats - and thus best confronted by the non-military elements of our national security toolbox -- the result could be a US national security and foreign policy apparatus that is ill-prepared and badly positioned to confront them.

So, ultimately, is the Gates budget spending too much on counter-insurgency? The Sec. Def. estimated that 50% of the budget is conventional, 40% dual use, and 10% straight counter-insurgency. That means between $50B and $70B that's completely counter-insurgency focused. Given that we do have two wars going, that doesn't seem crazy. However, it's also comparable to what we're spending overall on civilian foreign policy agencies. That could give a rough rule of thumb, military counter-insurgency spending should not exceed civilian spending.

How do we get to wear a large scale civilian shift is possible? I don't know. However, until we find that political approach, I'm going to try to be careful not favor any interventions that, even if legitimate, the U.S. lacks the capability to successfully implement.

What’s surprising about the poll is that the Afghans don’t appear to take the jump from “everything sucks and I don’t trust the United States to keep me safe” to “the United States is an illegitimate occupying force that I will not support.” Nearly 60 percent say the Taliban is the biggest threat to Afghanistan, but only eight percent say U.S. forces are. Support for attacks on U.S. troops are transactional, dependent on where there haven’t been airstrikes that kill civilians: it’s 44 percent in areas where the United States has recently launched airstrikes, and 18 percent where it hasn’t.

In general there is not support for more NATO troop presence. However, those areas with substantial numbers of international forces tend to be most positive. The airstrikes tend to happen where we’re weak. Dr. Cordesman argued that it’s important to differentiate between air strikes done with substantial advance planning, those done with bad intel, and close air support of coalition troops in tough fights. I was a bit surprised that he seemed to be arguing that the planned in advance bombings did not anger the populace in the way that the tactically necessary close air support did. Most all of the really controversial civilian casualties I’ve heard about were from bombings, admittedly he did allow for bad intel bombings but I don’t recall hearing about massacres resulting from close air support.

There’s local support for negotiation, but with preconditions that the Taliban should stop fighting. One key divergence from Iraq, by and large people seem to have no confidence in local militias. Only 18% of people think they can provide security and 17% think they’ve got strong local support. The numbers for the Taliban are about half that with Coalition forces being around 40% and legitimate government institutions all being 60%+. I tend to favor a more provincial approach, so I’m going to have to look at the data there closely to see what the Afghans are saying about that. Langer did mention that the ratings of provincial governments tend to vary on the basis of development factors while the national government was judged on both security and development.

So what’s the better than expected news?

There’s no real variance across ethnic groups and 77%Afghans first and their own ethnicity second. Afghanistan may not have a traditional of strong national governments, but that doesn’t mean they have ethnic separatists.

While we’ve been dropping about 8-10% points in terms of support each year, we do still have the majority. So long as that’s true I favor sticking it out.

While the security situation has gotten worse and have dragged down living conditions, local conditions have improved in terms of basic necessities and infrastructure. The economy is still doing terribly but is actually a trifle better than in 2007. This suggests to me that we’ve gotten better with development aid and that if we can improve the security situation we may be in a position to consolidate improvements.

From this report, I’d say we’re losing in Afghanistan but that we have not lost. The situation is going to be hard to handle, I’m not sure that we can. I haven’t heard anything strategically that greatly reassures me that we’re improving on any front other than the amount of resources. That said, resources do matter. Langer repeatedly emphasized that those areas where we had a strong presence, we were popular which Cordesman reasonably argued showed the benefits of Clear, Holding, and Building rather than just clearing.

December 16, 2008

Spencer Ackerman notes that Muntader al-Zaidi, the guy who threw his shoes at President Bush, is still being interrogated in Baghdad by the Maliki government which probably means he’s being tortured. Sounds like he’s got a lot of credibility on the streets though so I’d expect Maliki to back off once they realize they can’t effectively discredit the guy.

Also, my friend Lirazel (let me know if you want a link) who answers the question of whether people ever throw shoes in a non-insulting manner:

I did a little poking... in addition to tying shoes to the vehicles of the newly married as a symbol of fertility, apparently in the North of England the wives of fishermen used to throw old shoes at their husband's departing boats as a charm to bring them back safely!"

Brad Delong notes that even with perfect information, traders tend not to be rational in their valuing of assets. Why? Because if you buy an overpriced good, you can still make money selling it to someone willing to buy it at an even greater mark-up. Apparently the people who make the most money are those that buy a lot at the beginning of declining resources a sim and sell mid-way through. Momentum traders, those who buy when things rise and sell when they fall, do worst. In other words, now is probably a good time to buy stock.

November 29, 2008

I meant to add this a couple weeks ago but got distracted. Prof. Khan had been one of my favorites in grad school, I first read Krugman’s and Rodrik’s books in his class. I feel much better equipped to understand the current crisis and the net positive but mixed bag of globalization. I think I would have had a rudimentary sense of many of these discussions from the news, but now I have some sense of the theory and the possible solutions. As we as a nation debate what to do about the auto-industry or green infrastructure, I think Prof. Khan will continue to be a great resource.

The good news is that the money spent on green development projects will create more jobs than other public investments. By using a social accounting matrix for the US, I estimated that more than 22 jobs will be created by spending an extra one million dollars on green public investment projects. By contrast, even progressive, non-military projects at best create approximately 15 new jobs per million dollar expenditure. Of course, military-industrial complex creates even fewer jobs; fewer than 10 for every million dollars of added expenditures.

I recommend the post if you want to get a better idea for some of our options and their likely effects.

June 13, 2008

One of the reasons some U.S. aid may have been turned away by the Burmese government is that some of the assistance would come from warships. The U.S. Navy has a lot of capacity to do good, but even smaller detachment of ships still could pack a serious punch. We do have strictly hospital ships, such as the USNS Mercy shown below, but they’re only part of our response capability. One possible solution, suggested my friend and colleague Bryan Shea, might be to transfer some older ships to the State Department rather than selling or simply decommissioning them.’

The idea would face complications. To be effective the ship(s) would probably need to be forward deployed, perhaps combining aid with public diplomacy when there isn’t a disaster to respond to. Piracy can be a real issue in southeast Asia and aid teams often are targeted by spoilers or those simply seeking to rob them. An old nuclear carrier would have the advantage of fast movement but would raise a whole new class of concerns. But ultimately for our civilian agencies to be effective they must be in the field, and for large parts of the world, the field can be the oceans.

June 12, 2008

It’s about month since Cyclone Nargis hit. The Burmese government has consistently failed their people with 2.4 million still homeless. More aid was allowed in after the government conducted its unfair and unfree constitutional referendum in the week following the quake. Near as I understand it, some U.S. aid is allowed in, but the aid workers who can actually operate in the country largely have to be from Asian countries. Given the severe limits on aid, from most of the world, I think it’s safe to say that initial harsh U.S. comments might not have made the difference in terms of access and were certainly well deserved. Sullivan has a link with pictures.

I’d oppose a naval intervention, the Burmese government is made up of paranoiacs with no interest above maintaining power, they would escalate and a limited intervention would not stay limited. At the same time they’d likely cut off humanitarian access to those countries they’ve allowed in. Moreover, gross negligence in disaster response, while evil, doesn’t rise to the level of genocide. At the same time, setting aside China’s active opposition, we don’t have the support of democratic regional powers such as India or Indonesia.

However, as Matt Yglesias notes there are many opportunities, such as non-coercive relief opportunities in Sudan, where aid could help deal with disasters. We’d do well to gain experience by taking these opportunities that would give valuable experience. We actually handled the tsunami pretty well, but often have difficulty dealing with the other parts of a failed state even when we do have U.N. support. Learning to get better at that and developing a track record of success would much improve our performance and ability to gain support when coercion might be appropriate.

Image taken by groundreporter and used under a creative commons license.

May 29, 2008

The Washington Post has an overview of Tysons redevelopment plans and the controversies that are coming. Critics from the urbanist side of things are concerned that keeping Routes 7 and 123 as wide highways instead of "urban boulevards" and running Metro aboveground will create barriers between sections and compromise the potential for an urban feel of the area. Anti-development critics, meanwhile, raise the usual raft of concerns about noise, traffic, etc.

Do you think Tysons will overcome the NIMBYs and then also overcome its car-dominated backbone to create a truly useful urban fabric?

My take on running the Metro above ground is that it’s probably an acceptable price to pay. Heavy rail, unlike light rail, doesn’t work at street level (why not? it’s faster and the risk of electrocution). However, it’s still cheaper and my instinct is that it’s better to get those four stations than to provide fewer, let alone put these already hard fought projects at whole at risk. Don’t know Route 7 and 123 well enough to comment on whether that’s a sensible compromise.

Regardless, I’m mostly commenting on this because I regularly mock Northern Virginia’s roads, although I do have to say that Alexandria can be quite nice to visit (although some of the best stuff is a trek from the Metro). So here’s a tip of my hat to you NoVa. Good luck.

May 22, 2008

Went to an event today on attempt to provide a new web portal to allow people doing stabilization/reconstruction and disaster prevention and response. It’s trying to address the problem that people that there’s a lot of fragmented groups across the world working on these issues and they often don’t communicate well. Government side, civil-military divides and splits between multiple agencies further complicate things.

So the websites try to provide web 2.0 solutions to be a one stop shop allowing people to link to relevant resources or post original content. Worth checking out if you are interested in these resources or have some resources of your own that you want to promote.

My favorite comment was from someone in the audience who noted that the Brits no longer use the term “lessons learned” they use the term “lessons identified.” That is perhaps the least Orwellian name change I’ve ever heard of. Yay for increases in accuracy.

May 18, 2008

Apparently wheat prices have started to drop, although are still relatively high. Rice is still high, but we might start to see some relief in bread oriented parts of the world and some substitution elsewhere.

On the same topic, Tyler Cowen and Dani Rodrik disagree on many things but do agree that import protections in an attempt to build agricultural self-sufficiency is not the way to avoid this sort of problem. They may lead to more domestic production, but prices would be higher and there’d be less production in places where its more efficient. If the food crisis were driven by a breakdown in the transportation system, then I think you’d have an argument for self-sufficiency, but that doesn’t seem that likely of a problem.

They disagree on how to treat ideas like export taxes, that let countries keep their domestic food prices lower but adversely affect world supply, but that’s a topic I should discuss when I’m more with it.

May 12, 2008

Sounds like a real tragedy with the dead around 8500 at latest count. China’s had a run of incidents lately, the most recent major one were blizzards during a major travel season that threw the train system into chaos. According to Jill Drew’s reporting, the government’s sent 5000 troops to help with recovery which is probably a good response.

James Fallows, reporting from Beijing, has coverage of what’s been said by the Chinese media. Many channels are apparently not covering it, but CCTV is emphasizing how major officials are responding: "Background: after the country was paralyzed by unexpected snow storms in February, the leadership was criticized for a Katrina-like slowness in dealing with the problem. Prominent coverage now of the main officials responding immediately to this disaster."

Coverage from Taiwan and other Asian television stations have footage from Chengdu but CCTV has been slower to incorporate it.

Fallows gives some background on the area. I didn’t get their during my trip, closest I came was Chongqing which is in a neighboring province downriver. I think there’s actually a mistake in the Post article, based on the map the Three Gorges Dam isn’t in Sichuan:

- To help place this disaster: it is in almost exactly the same area I described in this article about the Wolong Panda Reserve, northwest of Chengdu, and this slide show about the reserve. A long, twisty road from Chengdu to Wolong, which had been undergoing years of reconstruction, passes right through the earthquake area. I assume it could be a long time before it is restored to even its perilous previous condition.

Hopefully the immediate visit by the Premier and the troops mean the government is going to have a successful disaster response. Local governments in China often botch these things, but it sounds like the resources of the central state are being brought in.

The issues of U.S. aid and criticism from the U.S. are a bit complex and I don’t want to take a detailed stand on them without know more. At present it sounds as if Burma is accepting aid from neighbors [who tend not to be criticial] and the U.N., but not the U.S.. But I will say that this is a disaster and not a government crackdown, the death toll itself critiques the government, even without a free media to spread the details. [Update: Based on a Salon write-up by Jurgen Kremp the Burmese government is definitely doing a terrible job. Similarly, it’s quite fair to make clear that we’re offering aid that’s being rejected and to provide accurate commentary through Voice of America type sources, I’m just a bit leery of top level condemnation at this point.]

May 06, 2008

...The problem with Bush’s foreign policy, according to the current liberal internationalist critique, has not been its fundamental goals, but the means used to pursue them: military force, unilateralism, etc.

To replace neoconservative democracy promotion by force, Obama seems to be proposing a different kind of crusade. He and his advisers seem to believe that American foreign policy can deliver the human race from indignity and want. Even if their strategy for achieving this goal doesn’t rely on military force, such an expansive view of the capabilities of U.S. foreign policy is dangerously unrealistic...

I’d switch "fundamental goals" to "stated goals" in the first paragraph but otherwise I’ll accept that argument. I’ll similarly accept the basic argument on the attempts to deal with global need being tricky, there’s room for fair debate there. However, he’s got the dignity promotion idea fundamentally wrong.

Dignity promotion isn’t an attempt to uphold dignity world wide, it’s an attempt to stop humiliating many of the peoples U.S. power interacts with, especially those who are under U.S. occupation (in part by ending said occupations). Similarly, by talking to foreign leaders, we recognize that while unelected leaders often have different interest than their people, their nations also have legitimately different interests than the U.S. At the same time scaling back our relationships with friendly dictators makes us less responsible for the offenses to their people’s dignity that they commit. Dignity promotion is restraint, not some oddball attempt to make the world safe for egos. So why does this matter? Because unlike poverty, anger about being occupied or at an unpopular government with a foreign is directly linked to terrorism.

As for dealing with people’s needs; ultimately this aid is not coercive and doesn’t tend to involve loans. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t problematic, there’s still risks certainly, but while it may prove an inefficient use of resources blowback is unlikely.

April 30, 2008

One quarter of U.S. corn production is now going into ethanol. At the same time farmers are shifting from other crops to grow corn so that percentage means more than it would have years ago. And for what? According to a recent study in Science magazine ethanol produces more CO2 than gasoline does. This isn’t a new idea, corn-based ethanol has always been a boondoggle. Without subsidizes this wouldn’t be happening because the process is unprofitable. Many defenders point out that corn grown for ethanol isn’t usable for food for humans, true enough, but the land could be used to crow crops that are edible.

For a long time, this sort of policy wasn’t worth that much political capital. Everyone knew it was a problem, but the U.S. system is heavily biased towards farm state Senators so fixing it was often thought to be more trouble than its worth. Ezra Klein cites a NY Times article by Andrew Martin where the International Food Policy Research Institute attributed a quarter to a third of the spike in commodity prices to biolfuels. The Food and Agriculture Organization at the UN predicted "predicted late last year that biofuel production, assuming that current mandates continue, would increase food costs by 10 to 15 percent."

Well now we’ve got a silent tsunami (via PCR) on our hands. The world food crisis could push 100 million people into absolute poverty.

December 28, 2007

No doubt it is a good bet that technology and sexual desire will continue to have a mutually supporting relationship. But Levy is not merely saying that sex toys will be more elaborate in the future. He is envisioning robots as essentially interchangeable with people. The problem is, a robot programmed to fall in love with a person is essentially a fancy inflatable doll. Imagine the awkward moments:

Robot: I love the clever way you comb those few, thin, feeble locks of hair all the way over the vast bald region of your head.

Human: You’re just saying that.

Levy stipulates, near the end of the book, that an important part of sexuality is "the possibility of failure or denial," and thus sexbots will need to be able to mimic human "capriciousness." But at some point you wind up with sexbots out of control, which, come to think of it, is a great idea for a science fiction movie.

I tend to agree with the bit about the possibility of "failure or denial." I’d argue it’s actively immoral to create any form of intelligent life without said possibility, and that goes for both pleasure and labor.

Anyhow, I think the jump of robots into love in a meaningful sense of the term is the jump of robots into intelligence. So I think that’s really a separate issue. Similarly the question of just having much more elaborate sex toys is fairly boring. That said, I’d bet the first big breakthrough in that field comes from Japan.

The more interesting area is the grey space between sex toys and love. Be it one night stands or old rich people wanting arm candy, there’s a lot of areas where people aren’t looking for the possibility of failure or denial that comes with love. Some of these relationships are mutually beneficial on multiple-levels for those involved. Others really aren’t and I’m hoping that at least in the capital intensive parts of the world robots might manage to replace some of the demand for exploited humans. In the labor intensive parts of the world, I don’t think we should expect that change to happen any time soon.

December 25, 2007

Happy holidays all, Merry Christmas to those that celebrate it. Anyhow, between holidays, finishing up a project due at the end of the year, and a trip to Illinois I think my posting will be pretty on and off for the next few days. Should revert to normal after New Years.

December 24, 2007

And yet Manalac is very much a guest in this country. He says he’llremain for as long as they’ll have him, though he doesn’t presume tohave any right to stay. If he were fired or became unable to work, he’d have to leave within seven days. He is subject to regular medical examinations to ensure that he is HIV-negative. He can’t bring his children here. He can’t bring his wife here. Were his marriage to fail, it would be illegal for him to marry a Singaporean. Were he female, a pregnancy would mean repatriation or abortion. The Singaporean government has made itself very clear: Foreign workers are here to build a nest egg, not to build a nest...

Manalac is permitted to work only in construction, and only for the employer who brought him here. If he is unhappy with his employer or feels he is being mistreated, he can return to the employment agency and request a new job, but the process is cumbersome and can be difficult to navigate.

None of this seems to bother him in the least. It’s just part of the deal, and the deal has worked out well for him. He says he harbors no resentment toward the government of Singapore: He is angry at his home government for depriving him of a job, not at Singapore for giving him one. He has never really had to wade into the bureaucracy; never had to fight to stay or to change employers. Those that have faced such problems have reason to feel more conflicted about the well-guarded doors Singapore opens for the region’s poor...

If there is one collective experience that should give the world pause about guest worker programs, it is the plight of Indonesian maids. Unlike male workers who are given housing, a day off once a week, and regulated hours, domestic workers often live with families with full control over the terms of their employment. They run a higher risk of abuse than other foreigners, and Asian tabloids are full of horrific headlines to that effect. There are stories of maids being burned with hot irons, scalded with boiling water, sexually abused by male employers and then physically abused by jealous wives.

It’s worth reading the whole article. It makes as good of an argument that can be made for such programs while at the same time being quite honest about the flaws in the program.

December 16, 2007

Do you live in Maryland? Do you care about transit? Want there to be more money for Metro so there’s less breakdowns? Want the Purple Line connecting Bethesda, Silver Spring, UMCP, and New Carrollton to be built?

Take the Maryland Department of Transportations survey here. It will probably take 10-15 minutes as they get into some detail. However, the current MDOT transit officials are pretty good and are trying to find ways to better balance Maryland’s roads versus public transit/walking.

I’ll also note that if you’ve got a transportation woe you want to gripe about now is your chance! In addition to the rest of the stuff, I finally put in a complaint about the bad sidewalk connections near my fiancee’s place. You can pick your own pet peeve. A 10-15 minute survey is easier than going to a hearing and less time intensive than protesting or going to rallies. If you care about this stuff, now is a great chance to show it.

October 12, 2007

As I approached the Lincoln Memorial, I spotted a water fountain shimmering in the distance beyond a cluster of parched and deserted baseball diamonds, but arrived to discover it was broken. So was the next one I encountered. And the next...

These days, the experience of visiting the National Mall is a lot like a junior high school civics class--there’s lots of history and statesmanship in the air, but it’s more pedantic than enjoyable, and going to the bathroom is all but out of the question....

Most of the people I encountered in late August were tourists, many of them foreigners, or unlucky folks who, like me, were forced either through ignorance, filial obligation, or a misplaced sense of patriotism to attempt the Bataan Death March from Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol....

Rather than mirror the great capitals of Europe as L’Enfant wished, the Mall mirrors the culture of Washington workaholism, promoting the belief that nothing of interest occurs after dusk and reinforcing the "state capital" quality from which the city suffers. As Richard Guy Wilson, chairman of the architectural history department at the University of Virginia, points out, "Politicians view the Mall as no more than a backdrop for national pageantry." In other words, they don’t actually use it. Consequently, the Mall is not a symbol of America so much as of the average American congressman--stately, aloof, and not much fun after 6 p.m.

Ouch. I hate to say it but this can be true. Water fountains are hit or miss, there’s far too little shade, and there’s not a lot of options in terms of food. Moreover the museums do all close down at 6 pm. Now there are some awesome museums, I often hit downtown to go to them, but the mall itself is often a parade ground for various events. I think it’s critical that we allow for large events, particularly marches and protests and such. However, much of this could be improved without adversely effecting such events. The other day I hit the National Book Fair to get a Terry Pratchett signature or two and the wait in the sun was not that pleasant.

From an analytical perspective, I suspect this happens because there’s a fair amount of demand to see the Mall regardless of how inviting it is. There’s consistently going to be a lot of tourists, so there’s not that much impetus to cater to them aside from quick and easy ways to get their money that don’t violate existing norms.

That said, the Tidal Basin does alright.. although you have to deal with some roads.

October 09, 2007

Sorry for the lack of warning. I really fell down on the job here. Anyhow, for those of you who live, work, or play in the northern D.C. suburbs, then you’ve probably already heard of the Purple Line. It’s an attempt to connect the spokes of the Metro system to allow for travel between the burbs without going downtown.

September 11, 2007

The PCR Project highlights an interesting article from the Boston Globe on using incremental infrastructure to improve conditions in Africa. It starts with a great success story about an [entrepreneur] named Alieu Conteh who started up a mobile-phone network in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the midst of a civil war. "Now his phone network is the most
important piece of infrastructure in the country, the only way most
Congolese can communicate with their neighbors and with the wider
world. Conteh's company, CWN, grew into Vodacom Congo, with 3 million
mobile phone users and a market valuation of $1.6 billion."

Infrastructure is typically thought to require some level of public investment. Why? Because it tends to require coordination and tends to be available for all, whether they contribute or note. However, as a friend of mine who's spent a lot of time in Africa has pointed out, many governments do a bad job with infrastructure. The good ones will take on manageable projects then maintain them. The bad ones ones will build super-highways then let them fall to pieces.

Incremental infrastructure provides a different economic model for infrastructure:

Successful Internet and phone projects suggest that there are at least
three common characteristics of successful incremental infrastructure
projects. These projects are atomic: A small part of the infrastructure
is useful by itself, like a single mobile phone tower that allows
people in a single city to make calls to one another. The projects are
financed in part by users, lowering the costs for the operator: Mobile
phone users buy their handsets and Internet users purchase their own
computers. Finally, these projects are providing capabilities that
weren't available before: they're new services, not an upgrade of
existing systems.

Beyond mobile phones the article gives a few more examples of the potential of incremental infrastructure:

"[H]igh-quality toll roads between a small village and a city." (Although railroads don't work under this model).

Mobile phone already have to invest in generators to run their services. They could take the next step, upgrade their generators, and start selling power to locals. (Ideally they'd use some renewable sources).

"[Congo] has more than 200 airports, most of which are unpaved landing
strips at the edge of dense forest... The investment to run one of these
incremental airlines is modest -- a refurbished Antonov aircraft, two
pilots, and a mechanic -- and their safety record is abysmal. But this
air infrastructure makes trips that would take weeks by water possible
in a few hours, and opens up trade between regions of the country that
would otherwise be impossible to reach.

These projects still will require millions. "Governments that encourage foreign direct investment -- especially
investment from their diasporas -- are more likely to see incremental
infrastructure develop."

I buy this argument. I think it's the equivalent of a scaled up version micro-finance. That said, I'm no libertarian. As the article points out, this technique can only work in certain cases. As the overall complexity rises, there's going to be some need for government support of standards if nothing else.

So why don't we see more of this already?

Foreign dollars might not have funded these projects in the past because in some ways they're inherently inefficient. Infrastructure has economics of scale and can be freely made available to all citizens. So part of the problem might be theoretically efficient government projects were competing with more achievable private projects. This actually comes up some in Iraq, I've heard that we continue trying to work with large power plants rather than a wide-spread network of generators because we don't want to admit defeat.

Technology is changing too quickly. Technological advances and mass production of items like mobile phones and small airplanes take time to disseminate throughout the world. Could be not everyone's figured out this trick yet. Note that this wouldn't explain why toll roads aren't more common unless the trick is EZ-Passes and the like.

Security. Incremental infrastructure still needs to be protected from those that would destroy or prey on it. The incremental nature helps some, since there's a constituency that might be willing to defend it. However, security limitations may kick in long before other forms of economic limitations do. This I think is the most worrisome problem and one that any major pushes for incremental infrastructure needs to address.

September 03, 2007

The President visited the city again a few days ago, "Even in the handpicked audience for the president's Wednesday morning
school appearance, some voiced skepticism mixed in with gratitude for
Bush's show of support." He can't even get a crowd of loyalists together, that pretty much says it all.

So what's the large[r] situation:

Still, only two-thirds of the pre-Katrina population of New Orleans
has returned to the city, and storm damage remains visible. Only 40
percent of the city's public school students have returned, although
sales tax receipts have climbed to 84 percent of pre-storm levels,
according to a new Brookings Institution report.

[The author] reverses gears and
writes a sensible, unemotional chapter about the debate over whether
New Orleans must remain a smaller city -- having a "smaller footprint,"
to use the vogue phrase -- in order to avoid having many of its
citizens return to areas that cannot be fully protected against
flooding and its consequences. One would expect Sothern to parrot the
line that "a smaller footprint would prevent poor people and minorities
from returning to their homes," but he comes out in agreement with
Pierce Lewis, the author of New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape
(published originally in 1976), that "allowing people to return to
homes in flood-prone areas [is] neither 'particularly humane' nor in
accord with civil rights, when 'you know that they could drown there.'
" Sothern says the real question is "whether it is possible to shrink
the city . . . in a manner that achieves justice for the people
displaced and a better, safer, more functional city for everyone," and
he's right.

In essence, what's happening now is a de facto shrinking of New Orleans footprint without any sort of social justice for those displaced. I tend to buy the argument that purchase of flood insurance should be mandatory (with a seller of last resort available from the Feds). The alternative is temporarily ameliorating the housing of the poor by giving them an economic incentive to put their lives at risk from disasters. The administration is using neglect, its favorite domestic policy tool, to force a smaller footprint without ever having to make the argument for what they feel should be done. Thus it falls to the Dems to speak for the dispossessed, the articles shows they're trying, but time will tell whether they make a difference.

August 29, 2007

As you may well know, foreign aid is fairly controversial. This isn't just because people don't want to be charitable. Unfortunately, a wide range of studies have found aid does not have a statistically significant relationship to economic growth. That said, there's two important corollaries: 1) aid may still make recipient's lives better in other ways and 2) there may be specific types of aid that, when appropriate to the country in question, work well with some consistency.

Another argument is that trying to help is generally a waste of effort because poorer nations can't be helped. There's a new book out on the topic that hasgottena lotof buzz called Farewell to Alms by Gregory Clark that reached the controversial conclusion that Britain went through the industrial revolution because for decades beforehand the rich had more surviving ancestors than the poor. The actual will study data seems pretty sound, but I tend to buy the argument by David Warsh that this book goes for the Guns, Germs and Steel level of scale without nearly enough support.

So, for those of us rejecting the idea that things are hopeless, here's two possible approaches:Dani Rodrik's:

So the real debate is not about whether aid works or not, but about (a)
under what circumstances it actually works; (b) how it can be reformed,
in principle, to become more effective; and (c) how likely is it
that the requisite reforms can in fact be undertaken. The disagreements
among Sachs, Easterly, Subramanian, Birdsall et al. are about these
questions, but they are often left implicit in the discussion.

The real issue is figuring out the most effective ways that
the rich world can help in boosting living standards and improving the other
conditions of underdevelopment (poor health, education, sanitation etc.) in
developing countries.... For
example, many demonstrably effective ways of helping the poorest, such as
financing research to create new agricultural technologies for Africa, have been, and remain, neglected. More tellingly,
even if better ways of helping have not been pursued, rich countries have flouted
even the Hippocratic rule of doing no harm—and that too on an issue such as
improving health and saving lives—while being ostensibly generous with
providing aid. I have in mind here the WTO’s intellectual property rules
(TRIPs), legislated into being by rich countries, which significantly impede
access to low-cost drugs.

I tend to think this is a pretty productive trade space for figuring out to help. However, this economics debate is a bit above my level. My main current thought on aid stems from an excellent talk by Paul Collier on his new book the Bottom BIllion which discusses state-level factors that keep a billion people stuck in absolute poverty (less than $1 a day purchasing power parity). One big factor is that a lot of states, particularly in Africa, don't really have viable borders. This is also a big driver of conflict and is a direct result of European colonial policies.

So what do we do about that sort of thing? Well Peacekeeping and such can be part of the solution, but simply avoiding conflict won't suddenly make these nations viable. On the whole, since WWII, since the founding of the UN, and particularly since the end of the cold war there's fewer wars and casualties of war. But in the absence of conquest there aren't really a lot of mechanisms available for creating viable countries. Simply clarifying borders won't suddenly solve the problems of a landlocked poor country without trade able resources. Moreover, there's pressure in places like Kosovo to create more states that probably aren't economically viable.

Absent massive refugee flows, I think we're going to need some new tools. The two basic options are: ceding territory to neighbors (which states are always loath to do) or increased political integration (which helped in post-WWII Europe, but has run into snags with the EU). If we want more economically viable states without returning to the bad old days of inter-state war, we need to figure out how to facilitate one or both of these options.